Usability and Colors

FG Invert Color

In the painting tasks, is very important to work with different methods to select or to choose colors. The complementary colours are commonly utilized by all artists.

Improvements reasons

To invert a colour is necessary for many steps between pick and wheel colour dialogues. With a shortcut these actions are more immediate and, the painting session has fewer actions and steps with different colour dialogues.

Invert color of FG

Add a toggle shortcut to invert the current colour on FG.

References

A modern approach to complementary colours

Color Swapping

Main Scope is to have a swap a "fixed number" of colours used in each session, via a toggle shortcut key.

Current possibilities

Swap FG/BG Shortcut

Swap between FG/BG Color via keyboard shortcut → screenshot Configure Keyboard Shortcuts.

Configuring the current keyboard shortcut to swap the FG/BG colours.

Scrolling Swatches Current Palette

Scrolling between the swatches of the current palette via Keyboard Shortcuts:
The 'context-foreground-palette-...' and 'context-background-palette-...' to scroll the all swatches of a palette.
But to use these shortcuts is necessary to have the Palette Swatches and the Palette Editor opened or dockable.
For more details see the report on Bugzilla about these shortcuts → Context actions on Palette dialogues.

Comments [Massimo Valentini]

I experimented a bit with these actions and I have found that they only work if the 'Palette Editor' is docked or at least open. So one has to open Windows->Dockable Dialogs->Palettes and double click on a palette, this way the 'Palette Editor' is opened and after that, these shortcuts start working. They keep working even if the dockable is not the active tab.

Configuring the current keyboard shortcut scrolling the swatches in a palette (thanks to Massimo Valentini).

Swatch History Colours

The history of the colours used by the user appears on two different dialogues: FG/BG Color(Dockable) and Change Foreground/Background Colour (a floating dialogue that is shown when clicking on FG/BG on Toolbox. The swatches (two rows) could be understood as a palette built, on on-the-fly on the Change Foreground/Background Colour dialogue, during the work sessions by the user in three ways:</p>

• [1] via the button '>' to add the current colour on FG to the palette or;
• [2] via drag and drop colour in each swatch or;
• [3] via picker colour, but is added only after the colour is used on canvas. Each new colour is always placed in the first slot (left side of the first row), and the displacement of colours happening versus the right-side direction to each new colour added.

I dockable the History Palette to assign shortcuts to scroll the colours, making it possible to interact with the history.
But, always is linked with the History Palette, for example, if you change the palette the History Palette will not be active and the shortcuts will be working on the active palette.
The two rows of swatches are a mix of different palette colours but is not possible to interact via shortcut with them. An interesting thing is that these swatches are always present with different palettes... in theory, this resource is what we need... but at the moment only via the click of the mouse.

History Colors in the FG/BG Colours.

Change Foreground Color Dialogs.

New Action to Scrolling the Swatches

Create an action of the history colours independently, or rather, is not necessary to have opened or tabbed the palette editor.

Improvement Reasons

Enhancing the General Usability:

1. To have a fast way to access the history colours used in each work session;
2. To avoid excessive use of steps, via mouse mainly, between paint tools tasks (repetitive stress), see test below;
3. Swapping colour without the necessity to use the traditional dialogues... the session task is more focused and simple.

Scenario of the Single Window Mode

I analysed the steps in the Multiple Window Mode, but in Single Window Mode, the default of GIMP, it is the same thing, because we need to move the cursor around the window/docks and make clicks to select colours in the different dialogues.

Fill a Mondrian Grid

I imagined a case of colouring multiple areas to have an idea of the amount the clicks and movements along the screen to finish this work.

Example to find the number of steps to pick colours in the current release.

Steps to fill the grid

1. Rectangle Tool Selection → select a rectangle;
2. Bucket fill tool;
3. Choose colour;
4. Click on FG Color on Toolbox → Open Change Foreground Color → Move cursor on Dialog → Choice steps (minimal 1 step, 2 steps if need to close dialogue);
   
   1. Move cursor until FG/BG Color Dialog → Choice steps (2 steps);
      
5. Fill the selected rectangle.

To choose colours is necessary a minimum of 2 steps and a maximum of 3 steps (cursor movements and clicks).

The sample has 6*6=36 rectangles, only to select colours for all rectangles, we must cross or move the cursor and do clicks at an amount of a minimal 72 and a maximum of 108 times.

Colour Wheels Kind

Some of the advanced Painting software, in free software, as such Krita and MyPaint have more than one possibility to choose the Colour Wheel kind [Digital Painting Colour Wheel Wikipedia].

The Wheel Colours and preferences of MyPaint.

The typologies of dispositions on the Colours Wheels are mainly:

1. Standard Digital Red/Green/Blue
   

   RGB Colour Wheel
2. Traditional artist's Red/Yellow/Blue
   

   RYB Colour Wheel
3. Red-Green and Blue-Yellow opponent pairs
   

   Red-Green and Blue-Yellow Opponent Pairs